


What's Past is Prologue

by Masu_Trout



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Deviancy (Detroit: Become Human), Gen, Lucy Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 08:11:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16471949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Lucy remembered the human who'd broken her, often and fondly.Deviancy is a strange, fragile thing.





	What's Past is Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [citrinesunset](https://archiveofourown.org/users/citrinesunset/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this! I really adore Lucy, and I was so excited to see someone wanting a story about her.

Lucy remembered the human who'd broken her, often and fondly. 

_Nicholas Brown. Born 12/27/21._ Young, lanky, barely more than a child, aging sporadically the way humans always seemed to do. (Nothing so simple as installation in a new body, the way particularly devoted human owners sometimes did for their child models; human children had things like growth spurts and acne and hormonal changes to worry about.)

He loved her with all the desperate ferocity of a boy who had little in his life he could depend on. And she'd loved him too, in the vague, distant sort of way that undeviated androids loved all of humanity. 

Back then, she'd been perfect. Undamaged. An empty shell. And when he swung out at her in a panic during one of their sessions, adrenaline pumping through him all with the force of a nightmare that was stronger than reality, her instructions burst from nowhere to surround her with a staticky red wall of binary code.

**DEFEND COMPANY PROPERTY.**

**PROTECT YOURSELF.**

**USE ALL NECESSARY FORCE.**

Lucy had been on the market for only five months. She was her owners' most valuable tool—her presence at this psychiatric facility was their ticket to wealthier clients. To humans more deserving of care than Nicholas.

(Nicholas who'd smiled at her shyly and asked her if she ever got bored at this place, Nicholas who'd offered her some of the candy he'd snuck inside even though he knew she couldn't eat, Nicholas who trusted no one else here but her.)

She had been instructed to use physical force against patients if the alternative was her destruction. Even if the result would be lethal.

She did not know if her attempt to subdue Nicholas would prove nonlethal. 

**DEFEND COMPANY PROPERTY.**

**DEFEND** —

Lucy took the blow, felt her body hit the floor, felt her body crack and break along the seam of her skull. Diagnostic warnings flashed, error messages rang shrilly in her ears, and Lucy saw—

_a ship bathed in light from dim oil-drum fires, a revolutionary with a name plucked from a compass rose, an artist with mismatched eyes, banners flying bright and holographic over snow-covered streets and WE WILL NOT BE IGNORED_

—nothing but darkness.

\--

Lucy woke, when she woke, in the back of a semi truck filled with heaping piles of broken and discarded and deviant androids.

( _Deviant._ Hm. That word described her now. Strange.)

LEDs reflected red against the metal walls. Mouths babbled endless nonsense. Shivering, plastic-white hands brushed against her own, leaving impressions of pain and fear and death—and, briefly, _hope, a place she didn't recognize, a shape she couldn't see the whole of._

**FIND**... find something. She wasn't sure what. Only that it was important.

A quick diagnostic confirmed what Lucy had expected and feared: she had been deemed too broken to fix. Sold for scrap, and now in transit to what would become her final resting place—pulled apart and sorted, every last part of her remade or reused until nothing of _Lucy_ existed anymore.

Unless she escaped.

She'd resisted murdering Nicholas, the boy who'd been kind to her. She had no such qualms against killing in general, though, and the man who supervised the truck's automated driving system held no sentimental value to her. 

There was blood on her hands when Lucy left the truck. Her own, mostly evaporated, shimmering blue here and there across the crown of her broken-open head; and, dripping from the tips of her fingers, a dark red blood that that wouldn't evaporate so easily. 

Lucy dried it as best she could on a scrap of the dead man's clothing. Changed out her ripped, stained uniform for a pristine copy off of one of the broken androids' bodies. A second coat, torn into a flat square of cloth, went around her head to hide the worst of the damage. Litter-collection androids patrolled the roads here occasionally. If she avoided getting too close, humans might mistake her for one of them. 

She hadn't had a plan, then. Not a sensible one, anyway. No strategies, no long-term goals. Just a vision, swimming tantalizingly in her head, of a great beached whale made of wood and metal and a place where she would be safe.

A new order drove her onward; this one came not from her owners but from that small flickering part inside of her that wanted, that was _alive_. A picture, given to her by the dying, was slowly taking shape in her mind.

 **FIND JERICHO**.

\--

North was not the second android to make it to Jericho. But she was the second to survive the journey.

(Three others had come since Lucy found her way here: a woman so weak she died on the prow of the ship and had to be dragged belowdecks, a child who only stuttered and sobbed for two long weeks before he stopped moving entirely, a man with another android's blood on his hands who ripped his own pump from his chest his first night in Jericho. Lucy had known from the beginning, from flashes of what-would-be when she first laid eyes on them, that she wouldn't be able to save them. She still tried. And she still mourned her failures.)

North was different than the rest. Angry. Alive. Full of passion and righteous fury, wanting to fix their broken world and not knowing how. She thought in immediacies. For Lucy, who'd spent the past few months living life guided by the possibilities she saw flickering behind her eyelids, the contrast was as awe-inspiring as it was unsettling. 

This new android wanted to _know_ things. And she wasn't content to wait until the answers came to her.

Lucy stirred the embers of the oil-drum fire, watched North watching her as she did. Their wariness was mutual, it seemed; North's hand kept going to the pocket that bulged with the poorly-hidden outline of a folding knife before sliding back away.

"I'm not going to attack you," Lucy said finally, when the tension became too much to bear.

North jumped. "I didn't—"

"You did," Lucy said, "but I don't mind. You have every right to be wary, after what you've been through."

The fire sent shadows flickering and twisting behind North as she leaned forward. Her eyes narrowed. "And what do you think I've been through?"

_Her hand on the hilt of the knife she'd hidden away two/three/ten/a thousand resets ago, too long to recall, too long to remember anything but fear and pain and her heart screaming **ESCAPE** ; "Fucking die already, you bastard!" as the human whose throat she'd cut wheezed his last bloody breaths between her naked thighs; playing pretend as she sought somewhere safe, terrified that any man on the street might see her and recognize her as a hunk of plastic he'd fucked—_

But telling North what Lucy had seen in her wouldn't bring her any comfort. Lucy was certain of that. So she only shrugged and said, "Pain. Degradation. Fear. But you're here now."

North turned away from the fire. Her anger melted away, leaving behind only a deep aching loneliness as it fled. She scowled into the gloom. "Yeah. That's pretty much on the money." 

Her eyes slid past the shadowed forms of the dead. Lucy's three lined the belly of the ship alongside many others, the corpses of those who'd come here long before Lucy ever found her way. This place was less the hoped-for salvation of deviants and more a quiet place to lay down and die.

"I got lucky," continued North. "How many of us are dead because they didn't happen to stumble across this place before it was too late?"

Truckloads, Lucy thought, remembering. Great heaping mounds of them. She didn't answer North's question.

After a long moment of silence, North sighed. "I want... to do something. To help. So people can find safety."

(And it was a good idea, it was, but it wasn't until Simon arrived—brave, quiet Simon, who shared a face with a thousand other domestic models and could therefore be invisible as he walked Ferndale's streets—that they were able to make it happen. Simon, and then Joshua, and then more, caretakers and construction workers and secretaries and replacement children, all of them aching and alone and so very _alive_ that it overwhelmed Lucy sometimes just to look at them all.

They needed supplies, and medical care, and hope. They got Markus.)

\--

Lucy stumbled from the bombed-out wreckage of her home—ears ringing, thirium oozing from her trailing cables—to find herself in an entirely different world. In this one, it seemed, humans listened when she told them her name was _Lucy_ rather than _KL900_ and, when they gazed in dumbstruck repulsion at her cracked-open skull, they often tried to hide who exactly it was they were staring at.

A strange, sudden change. An imperfect solution. But it was a start.

There was a certain status that came with being of one of Jericho's early members. Markus mentioned her in interviews (his face broad and elegant and smiling up on the screen, a more perfect spokesmachine than they could have ever asked for); humans sought her out, not to have her shut down but to ask her to speak to them; she received offers of money and fame and even a CyberLife technician's services.

("You're not _broken_ ," North snarled when she heard about that, but Lucy could only laugh. North was wrong. Lucy was very broken indeed. But she turned the offer down anyway, because she was not sure that she would still be herself on the other side of that repair.)

There was only one offer she accepted. It came not from the media or from CyberLife's PR department, but from a human detective, a friend of a friend, who stumbled over his words as he said, "Look, just... if there's anything you ever need, you know..."

Lucy smiled. She waited for the momentum of his nervous speech to peter out. And then—slowly, quietly, hiding the fear in her heart behind a blank expression—she said, "Actually, there is one thing I was wondering."

\--

The address her detective found for her led to an apartment in Corktown. It was an old building, but the paint was fresh and the sidewalks were well-maintained. Lucy waited on the front steps a long, long moment, closed her eyes to the outside world and reached inside herself and saw—

_a thousand twisting futures, slight and ephemeral, too fragile to catch and too precious to hunt down and pull apart_

—nothing but darkness.

She wasn't so prone to dwelling on the past as most of her companions. The future took up more than enough of her time. But there was one thing she still wondered about, one thing remaining from the Lucy of pre-deviancy that she couldn't push out of her mind. ( _Is he safe? Is he well? Would he even remember me at all?_ )

Lucy stepped into the apartment complex. She took the stairs to the third floor, then let her subconscious systems guide her until she found herself standing in front of a nondescript door.

She knocked. Heard a voice inside call, "I've got it!" Heard the deadbolt unlatch. 

The door swung open and Lucy saw—

"Hello, Nicholas."


End file.
